Knapp Commission Reunion Has an Unexpected Currency

By JOSEPH B. TREASTER

Published: June 28, 1992

It was planned as a pleasant evening of reminiscences about an investigation 20 years ago that brought sweeping reform to a New York City police department mired in corruption.

But only that morning the newspapers carried front-page stories about the creation of a new investigative body with a similar mission.

So as they dined in the crimson-curtained main room of the Merchants Club near City Hall Friday night, members and friends of what had become known as the Knapp Commission found themselves pondering whether history was repeating itself, whether their antidote to thieving police officers had run its course and whether a dose of strong new medicine was needed.

Many were corporate lawyers; some had become judges. By nature and training they were cautious, but they ventured the opinion that the latest police corruption scandal would be far more limited than the one they helped put down. Cyclical Theory of Honesty

"My hunch is that it's not the same," said Whitman Knapp, the gray-haired Federal District Court Judge who was chairman of the commission that issued its final report in 1972. "My hunch is that it's not endemic the way it was back then."

Nicholas Figueroa, a State Supreme Court justice who served as a Knapp Commission staff lawyer, outlined his and others' belief in a cyclical theory of corruption "just as there is a cycle in the financial markets."

"And the cycle has come around again," he said. "This is due to the fact that people rest on their laurels. They become complacent and the police give in to temptation."

"What we're going to get today," he said, "is clusters of corruption. In the old days, in the pre-Knapp days, you had networks in the Police Department going horizontally and vertically. Now what you have is groups of individuals who will engage in corruption in a very limited area. It is no longer organized. They are no longer as mutually protected."

City Hall's reaction to the recent reports of police corruption, ranging from allegations of drug dealing to robbery and murder, has been different, too. Support for the Commissioner

In 1970, a disillusioned police officer named Frank Serpico and a colleague on the force, David Durk, who had graduated from Amherst College and studied law, were unable to get anyone in the Police Department or the Mayor's office to listen to their accounts of police units methodically collecting and divvying up bribes to overlook crimes.

Only after the officers took their story to The New York Times and a reporter, David Burnham, wrote a series of articles detailing the corruption and noting that the city's leaders had failed to respond, was an investigation begun.

This time, even before the scope of the corruption is known, Mayor David N. Dinkins has appointed an independent investigative commission.

As the Knapp Commission inquiry got under way, the Police Commissioner, Howard R. Leary, resigned. But Nicholas Scoppetta, who began as a Knapp Commission staff lawyer and went on to develop police corruption cases as a special Federal prosecutor, said he did not expect the same fate for the current Commissioner, Lee P. Brown.

"He has every indication of being the kind of commissioner to be a reformer," said Mr. Scoppetta, now in private practice. A Previous Engagement

Neither Mr. Serpico nor Mr. Durk, both of whom have left the force, attended the reunion and no one seemed to know much about what either had been doing lately. Mr. Burnham, who is at work on a book about the Justice Department, sat at the head table with Michael Armstrong, the Commission's chief counsel, now a partner in a New York law firm, who organized the gathering.

At peak strength, the Knapp Commission had 12 investigators and a handful of lawyers and it managed for two years on no more than $750,000. The Commission members were workers, not talkers, self-effacers rather than self-promoters. Only a few took a turn before the microphone at the dinner.

Some who did recalled the terror of accidentally dropping an air-conditioner from a window of their 14th-floor office in lower Manhattan. Mercifully, it crashed on a ledge well above the street. And then there was the time an undercover officer's recording device suddenly began transmitting his conversation with a suspect to the speaker of a television set in a crowded bar.

Many Commission members recalled with wonder verging on admiration the exploits of William Phillips, an officer who, after being accused of extortion, became the commission's chief undercover operative, only to be convicted later of murdering a pimp and a prostitute. Ellen Fleysher, a television journalist, read a letter from Mr. Phillips, congratulating the Commission, "one and all on a job well done."

"I regret I cannot personally be with you tonight," he wrote, "but the Department of Corrections had other plans for me. Thank you, and good evening from Auburn Prison."